Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks caused outages for certain services, including Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR), on the East Coast starting on Thursday.
The DDoS attacked started late on Thursday night and knocked out service for United States citizens living on the East Coast. This included Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, Netflix, Inc.(NASDAQ:NFLX) and several other websites.
The reason that Twitter and the other websites were affected by the DDoS attack is that they share one thing in common: Dyn is the company that handles their domain name services. Dyn was the target of the DDoS attack late Thursday that led into Friday.
According to Dyn, it started monitoring and investigating the DDoS attack on its system at 6:10 a.m Eastern Time this morning. The company said that the majority of services were restored as of 8:20 a.m. Eastern Time this morning. However, it later noted that the attack may also include its Dyn Managed DNS advanced services. This could cause lag in its services.
“It’s interesting that nobody has yet claimed credit for the attack,” Robert Page, the lead penetration tester at security firm Redscan, told The Guardian. “The relative ease at which DDoS attacks are to execute however suggests that the perpetrators are most likely teenagers looking to cause mischief rather than malicious state sponsored attackers.”
The DDoS attack that hit Twitter and other websites isn’t just being monitored by the domain name services company. The White House press secretary told reports that the Department of Homeland Security is also monitoring the attacks against Dyn.
